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Global Digital Library Approaching Reality

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By JOHN WARD ANDERSON, The Washington Post

Published: October 18, 2007

PARIS - As ideas go, they don't come much bigger: Digitize the accumulated wisdom of humankind, catalogue it, and offer it for free on the Internet in seven languages.

The first phase of that simple yet outlandishly ambitious dream is about a year away from being realized, according to a group of international librarians, computer technicians and U.N. officials who unveiled a prototype for the project, called the World Digital Library, in Paris on Wednesday.

Its creators see it as the ultimate multilingual, multicultural tool for researching and retrieving information about knowledge and creativity from any era or place.

The WDL Web site ( www.worlddigitallibrary.org) will provide access to original documents, films, maps, photographs, manuscripts, musical scores and recordings, architectural drawings and other primary resources through a variety of search methods.

'The capacity to search in the various ways that will be possible in the World Digital Library will promote all kinds of cross-cultural perspectives and understanding,' said James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who proposed the project two years ago. The ability to cross-reference information pulled from 'the deep memories' of cultures is 'an exciting frontier possibility for the world,' he said.

The prototype introduced Wednesday allowed searches by time, geographical location, topic and format, with the ability to narrow results by limiting them to books, photographs, movies or recordings. For written materials, the same content was simultaneously available in seven languages, and expert analysis by site 'curators' either was translated or available in subtitles.

The different search techniques permit a user to retrieve information for certain years and countries, so that in addition to being able to browse the collected knowledge of the world in the 1400s, for instance, a user could also limit a search to a topic such as art in Egypt and China in the third century B.C.

Similarly, a user could specify a medium - for example, only photographs from New York and Paris in the 1920s.

The library is being developed by the Library of Congress in partnership with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, an arrangement that officials said would broaden the program's reach and appeal.

The library will begin offering content on its site in late 2008 or early 2009, Billington said, with the ability to 'rapidly ramp up' as countries digitize their archives and make them available. The site will have a few hundred thousand items to begin with, officials said.

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